


A Million Shadows [10/10]

by balthesar



Series: A Million Shadows [10]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-02
Updated: 2011-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-23 09:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balthesar/pseuds/balthesar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'We've got a few handguns, some ammunition, and--' Gwen plopped back in her seat with a concerned frown. 'Grenades.'</p><p>'We've got grenades?' Owen asked, a spark of delight in his voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Million Shadows [10/10]

Jack tore back into the boardroom where the team was waiting, still surprised by his abrupt departure and startled again by his more abrupt return. Owen and Gwen were playing Hangman on the whiteboard between the scrawled talking points -- she'd managed to spell out _c-ito-i-_ \-- and Ianto was looking over Toshiko's shoulder at a morphing graph on her laptop. As the tempered glass door slid shut behind Jack, everyone turned to look at him.

"Cybermen," Jack blurted.

" _What?_ " Ianto replied. Emotions ranging from baffled to concerned to murderous warred within him.

Owen frowned and leaned on the glossy table. "Like at Canary Wharf?"

"Wait," Toshiko said. "I thought there _weren't_ Cybermen anymore. Torchwood records indicate the breach in London was sealed and the Cybermen were trapped."

Jack's heart was still racing. "No, no -- those Cybermen were just _one_ group of Cybermen. All throughout space and time, there are Cybermen and there's a dozen ways they're created and replicated -- we only got rid of _one_ group, who pushed through from an alternate universe." He was still breathing quickly, looking from face to face, willing them to understand. "But in _this_ universe, about 900 years from now, Cybermen invade Earth. There's twelve billion people on the planet and the Cybermen tear through them like wildfire. You manage to fight them off, but there's millions and millions of people injured who need organs." He paused, to see if anyone else could put the puzzle together.

Owen nodded slowly, comprehending the enormity of the situation. "So a virologist puts together a virus..."

"And by then, Earth's developed time travel..." Ianto added thoughtfully.

Jack nods quickly. "They send out a virus, wait for it to incubate, then they come collect the bodies."

Gwen shook her head. "Jack, how do you know all this?" she asked with suspicion.

"There _isn't time_ ," he nearly growled, frustrated.

"Right," Toshiko said. "What do we do, then?"

Jack fell suddenly quiet and looked a little guilty. The only way he could think of would destroy his hope of ever being rescued, of ever hearing that tell-tale arrival. He could protect the Earth now, but his ship was never going to come in. "We use the Rift manipulator to slam the breach closed on whoever's coming to get the bodies."

Toshiko and Ianto said, " _Rift manipulator?!_ " in perfect indignant unison.

"What about the people who're already comatose?" Owen demanded.

Jack clenched his fist. "We deal with them after we know they're not going to get kidnapped!" He and Owen glared at each other for several long moments before Gwen cut in.

"How do we know something hasn't already come through the Rift?"

Jack sighed inwardly. "We don't. Ianto, Gwen, Owen, I want you out there on the streets taking care of anything that's come through. This is clean-up only; we don't know how much human is left in a partially-converted Cyberman, so shoot them first, before they shoot you." Gwen looked unhappy at this but said nothing. "Tosh, you're with me. We're going to reverse the polarity through the Rift manipulator and close the breach."

***

Toshiko sat tapping at her laptop, silent and not quite accusatory. She was perched on a step near the steel monolith with her laptop balanced on her knees. One side of the monolith was opened to reveal a tall bank of sockets, dials and displays; dozens of cords were plugged in seemingly at random. Jack's head and shoulders disappeared into the metal grid of the catwalk and reappeared again as he pulled out an armful of rubber tubing and coloured wires. He sat back on his heels, examining the small labels dangling from the various wires -- tiny white tags marked in black with numbers, abbreviations and Greek symbols.

"You have the equation?" he asked, disconnecting a link of black plastic four-pronged plugs the size of his fist.

"Yes," Toshiko replied. She paused, then said, "I didn't know we had a Rift _manipulator_."

"I built it." Jack's voice was slightly muffled as he plunged back into the guts of the machine.

She looked at him. "Why?"

"There's someone I've been trying to find," he half-explained. Standing, he examined a fistful of cables and dragged them to the control panel. He yanked out several plugs from the monolith and began carefully inserting the wires he'd found into the sockets.

Toshiko's lips thinned into a line. "Why?" Trying to get personal information from Jack was like trying to get blood from a stone.

Jack flipped a series of stubby breaker switches and leaned in to get a closer look at a dial. "What's the readout?"

"Two sigma over alpha." Come on, don't change the subject. "Three-point-five sigma over alpha."

He nodded. "Good." Jack evaluated how much he could afford to tell Tosh about the Doctor against how much he cared to say at the moment. Shrugging, he hedged. "I need to talk to them. I've got a problem only they can solve."

As Toshiko opened her mouth to reply, Jack cut her off. "Readout?"

"Eight sigma over alpha."

"Alright." He fingered a large lever, the sort often found as a throttle in aeroplanes and starships. "Showtime."

***

"What exactly are we supposed to be looking for?" Owen grumbled. "I haven't seen anything but old ladies out shopping and that bloke dealing in the alley."

"Cybermen," Ianto answered dryly, turning onto Queen Street without slowing down much. "Or victims thereof."

Gwen frowned, staring out the tinted window of the Torchwood SUV as they passed a shopping centre. "Does Jack actually think that Cybermen are going to appear out of thin air? I mean, _now_ ," she clarified at an 'are you joking?' glance from Owen. "It's been days since people started getting sick. Why wouldn't they have showed up already?"

"Maybe they were waiting for the virus to work." Owen shrugged. "Hey, toilet paper's a pound fifty at Tesco," he said, nudging Ianto in the ribs as they passed the shop.

Ianto frowned at him. Owen's bony elbow jabbing him in the side wasn't making it easier to drive. "If you'd stop using so bloody much, it wouldn't be an issue."

"I like my hands to stay clean."

"Ugh," Gwen said, rolling her eyes.

Owen turned in the front passenger seat to look back at Gwen. "So when -- if -- we find these Cybermen coming through the Rift, what's Jack expect us to do? Is there a rocket launcher in the back there or something, or are we just expected to reason with them?"

"I don't think Jack expects you to reason with anyone, Owen," Ianto said.

Gwen leaned over the seat to inspect the magazine. "We've got a few handguns, some ammunition, and--" She plopped back in her seat with a concerned frown. "Grenades."

"We've got grenades?" Owen asked, a spark of delight in his voice.

Ianto didn't take his eyes off the road. "No grenades for you."

"Says who? I think I might need a grenade..."

"Guys?" Gwen's voice shook a little as she cut into the bickering. She pointed out the window, at a massive dark shape materializing only a couple hundred feet above the skyscrapers of the city centre. "Did Jack say specifically that whatever came through would be people-sized...?"

Owen blanched at the gathering shape. Ianto hit the brakes and the SUV came to a screeching halt on the edge of a crowded car park.

"Not specifically, no," Ianto admitted.

A crowd was beginning to cluster in the gaps between cars as shoppers and drivers stopped to watch a massive hovering spaceship fade into view. Shaped like a modern jet but fatter, rounder, with stubbier wings and fins, the ship slowly appeared, as though a mist hanging around it were being burnt away. Owen mentally admitted that grenades were unlikely to be much help.

***

"The readout's holding steady now?" Jack asked, his heart pounding again. His palms were sweating as he gripped the lever. This was his last chance to find the Doctor, to study the Rift and call out into the darkness. He wondered if the Doctor knew -- if the Doctor could sense that a door was closing. _It hardly matters_ , he thought. _It's not as though he's come to find you in all these years_.

"Yes," Toshiko said, her eyes glued to the monitor.

Jack nodded and pulled the lever down. From deep inside the monolith, a roar erupted for a few long seconds before dying down completely. As the crackling of electricity faded and his ears stopped ringing, Jack's heart sank. The sound was gone and the Hub was silent in a way it hadn't been in a long time. He could hear the low hum of the fan on Tosh's laptop, the whirr of the computers above them, but nothing that sounded like the T.A.R.D.I.S.

***

"What the fuck?" Owen exclaimed, louder than he'd meant to, as what looked like lightning arced across a barely-overcast, midday and otherwise storm-free sky. No one could hear him over the colossal _BANG!_ that echoed over downtown Cardiff as the lightning hit the half-corporeal spaceship hovering above them. It exploded like a firework, raining down tiny shards of glass and metal and what Gwen squeamishly feared were little pieces of pulverized people.

***

"The counter-virus is nearly synthesized," Toshiko told Jack as he passed the workstation where she and Owen were bent over microscopes. "It's easy enough to reverse it with the information you gave us, especially since it seems it's been contained now."

"Good," Jack said tersely, heading for his office. "Let me know when it's done."

Owen looked up and smoothed down his lab coat. "What then?"

Jack stopped for a moment to reply. "Then you replicate it and we distribute it." Wasn't this bit obvious to a doctor?

"It's going to take a lot of time to get this to everyone who needs it."

Jack shrugged with a wry half-smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "So dump it in the water along with the oestrogen and fluoride and everything else."

Owen gave him a look that clearly said 'you're not helping'. "Fine, I'll come up with something."

Jack didn't respond, but finally walked into his office and closed the door. Brushing past his greatcoat, hung on an antique hat stand in the corner, he opened a cabinet and withdrew a cut-glass decanter of brandy and a tumbler. He sat behind the desk and poured himself nearly two fingers of the amber liquid. Brandy should always be drunk neat, in his opinion, and he savored a mouthful before letting it burn down his throat.

It was foolish, wishful thinking to have hoped that he could've found the Doctor, somewhere out in the Time Vortex. Even when he'd built the Rift manipulator from plans and information cobbled together from his wrist computer, it had been a long, old shot. The Doctor hadn't come back on Satellite Five, had he? Hadn't come back to rescue Jack from abandoning him among the corpses of people far in the future. And Jack had managed to beg, borrow, cheat and steal his way back -- not that he'd aimed too well, because the nineteenth century was a long fucking wait when you were living life in the slow lane, trying to get to the twentieth; he should've aimed for home, for the fifty-first, instead of the Doctor's favorite bloody century. Where was the Doctor now? Cardiff wasn't such a goddamn long trip from London -- hell, he'd stopped there a couple times with the Doctor himself, so it wasn't like he didn't know where it was -- so why wasn't he looking for Jack?

 _You've always got to allow for the possibility that he just doesn't give a flying fuck,_ Jack thought. _It's not like you're staying quiet. Torchwood's easy to find and so's an alien transdimensional blue police box._ Waiting decades to be found and not even a postcard, Jack reflected with a surly frown and gulped his brandy.

He set the glass down on top of a stack of papers and flyers that Ianto had left -- a Jubilee Pizza advert, demands from the higher-ups for reports, a photocopied circular sporting one of the Cottingley fairy photos, expense records, a user manual for the new GPS system -- and climbed down into his bedroom bunker to find some solace.


End file.
